MG9 Heavy Particle Cannon
The MG9 Heavy Particle Cannon was a heavy weapon used by The Royal Allegiance during the Swarm War. History In use for many years by the time of the Swarm War, the MG9 Particle Cannon was a large and powerful weapon. While not the most advanced or refined weapon in the Allegiance arsenal, it was certainly one of the most powerful, and it was deemed fit for service until at least the 2780s. As a direct result of the war, it remained in frontline use for nearly a century after that date. It served as the oldest, most proven example that Particle Cannons could be used as an extremely capable weapon, given refinement and investment. As a result of its success, further developments in the field were made, resulting in the introduction of smaller particle weapons such as the DX52 Particle Cannon and DP55 Particle Cannon. Usage The MG9 was used as a heavy antiship armament, as a secondary tier weapon after the ship's main, linear cannons. They were effective at pounding shields into submission, but blasting through armour was where they came into their own. They excelled in large fleet engagements where they beat larger but less numerous cannons, with the ability to fire on many more targets and suppress them. They fired in a fashion much like a semi-automatic weapon, one shot, then a period of 4 seconds to cool. The cannons were generally far less powerful than a ship's linear main guns, though made up for this by the ability to be mounted in higher numbers. They had a power output of around 1,250,000 terajoules per blast, which was many times smaller than linear cannons. Their primary purpose was as heavy turreted weapons able to engage ships at both long and short range, especially those out of the main cannon's field of fire. The turrets were the primary engagement weapons after the internally-mounted stationary forward weaponry, and had two tracking modes. The first, precise, long-range tracking mode, the turrets could hit a target five meters wide at a range of four light minutes (107,925,285 kilometres). During close-range combat and fleet engagements, the turrets could rotate fully in under six seconds with their fast-tracking mode, able to hit the majority of slow and fast-moving vessels. When used as part of a land-based defence system, the guns were rarely trained on ground targets, instead focusing on bringing down targets such as starfighters, support craft and warships. However, when turned on ground targets, the weapons were extremely powerful, causing heavy destruction in a large radius. Because of this, they were used for far-off targets, the heaviest of tanks and units far from friendlies or any areas where collateral damage would be ideally avoided. Design The weapon consisted of a single heavy barrel mounted onto an armoured turret. The turret was mounted on a fast-tracking base, enabling fast target acquisition and engagement, and could traverse 360 degrees in under six seconds. The turret contained the fire control centre, which was used for when the turret was not mounted onto a warship. When it was, the weapon was fired from remotely from inside the warship. The turret contained a powerful sensor package, which worked in tandem with the ship's central targeting and sensor systems. The sensors were quite localised, having a range of 3,000,000km. The weapon could rely on these sensors even if the ship's ones were taken out, which was a rare occurrence. The whole net of sensors provided a full field of detection around the ship, aiding considerably in short range target acquisition. The turret house was protected by several layers of ACE Armour, which was molecularly compressed using various advanced techniques.